Armitage Lab

Of Note...

A workshop on “Exotic Insulating State of Matter” was held at JHU on January 14-16, 2010. Information on the conference can be found here.

About us....

The Armitage lab at The Johns Hopkins University uses various 'optical' techniques to investigate a variety of complex condensed matter systems. The main interest of the group is exotic electronic states of matter at low temperatures, including exotic superconductors, novel magnetic states, electronic glasses, and materials in proximity to quantum critical points. Other areas of interest are nanostructures, biological physics, and aspects of physical chemistry and quantum optics.

We are developing a number of low-energy optical spectroscopies in the so-called 'Terahertz gap' - the experimentally difficult frequency region above that attainable with electronics, but below that accessible with optics (photonics). This frequency range is host to many phenomena in condensed matter systems and is a frontier in 'optical' and condensed matter research. Among other apparatuses, we are implementing a novel time-domain THz spectrometer, which is one of the emerging tools for condensed matter physicists in obtaining spectroscopic information in this technically challenging frequency range. A new microwave `Corbino' broadband spectrometer has also been developed.

We are members of the Institute for Quantum Matter (IQM). IQM is a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University funded by the DOE, which seeks to expose and understand materials dominated by quantum coherence and correlations. IQM combines chemical synthesis, advanced spectroscopy, and theoretical analysis for new fundamental understanding of interacting many-body systems.